I thank Judith Rodriguez for extending and illuminating my
reading of Aileen Palmer's poem by drawing attention to John
Manifold's poem 'The Sirens'. Palmer may have met John
Manifold in London--she did meet John Cornford--although I have found no
direct reference to their meeting. She respected his poetry,
particularly 'the colloquial, apparent simplicity of his expression
within the frame-work of traditional verse-forms'. (2) She was to
emulate this style, which was consistent with their communist politics
of writing poetry for the ordinary people.

Palmer wrote 'The Swans / The Wanderer' in hospital in
1948 and she refers to poems by John Manifold several times in her
manuscript '20th Century Pilgrim', written while she was
receiving treatment there. While she does not specifically mention
'The Sirens' in the manuscript, she does refer to 'the
sheaf of Manifold (only in typescript)' on the chair by her bed
that she 'had used a great deal at some times', indicating
that, possibly through her parents, she may have had access to copies of
his poems before publication. (3)

The sonnet Palmer wrote is clearly a response to Manifold's
but, as Rodriguez observes, negates his vision, transforming the
sirens' 'luscious music' into an air-raid warning siren.
In the sextet, she takes up Manifold's reference to swans and makes
them stand in for the bird-women of Homeric legend. This final section
carries, I agree, a rebuke to Man[ifold]'s 'sexual
flippancy' and over-confidence. Curiously, Manifold lists [Thomas]
Morley among the composers whose music his sirens are singing. When I
first read Palmer's sonnet, I was reminded of the music of another
composer of the late sixteenth century English Madrigal School, Orlando
Gibbons. Does Palmer reference his madrigal 'The Silver Swan',
who 'When death approach'd, unlock'd her silent
throat'? Palmer's warning of the consequences of refusing to
listen to women's voices echoes the warning in Gibbons' last
line: 'More geese than swans now live, more fools than
wise.'

The 'deep and ringing' tones of the swan-sirens give
them an authority that subverts the conventional feminine timbre. The
Southerly reviewer of Palmer's collection World Without Strangers?
(which contains 'The Wanderer') commented that 'Miss
Palmer--elder daughter of Nettie and Vance--has an incisive, at times,
even insistent voice, and she speaks in the confident tone of a
politically aware and intellectually alert twentieth-century
woman.' (Lear would hardly say of either of the women under review
'Her voice was ever soft/ Gentle and low, an excellent thing in
woman'. (4)) Ironically, Palmer wrote that sonnet in a psychiatric
hospital, where she had no voice, 'as one of those things that
people in mental hospitals write to recover from what they are going
through'. (5)

In her 1948 poem, Aileen Palmer shifts the sirens from their
traditional position as 'Other' to the Odyssean poet/hero and
gives them a voice that is more than 'charming'; thus, as
Rodriguez points out, making 'a claim for the importance of
women's writing'. Nearly three decades later, Margaret Atwood
wrote a poem that is every bit as 'upbeat' in tone as
Manifold's 'The Sirens', but her 'Siren Song'
('Shall I tell you the secret/and if I do, will you get me/out of
this bird suit?') is written from the point of view of the sirens
themselves, who are thoroughly bored with the position to which the male
poets have relegated them. (6)

Odysseus heard the sirens: they were singing
no luscious music, but an air-raid warning
across the dark, that scared some people, bringing
beds to the holes they'd sleep in till the morning
with some security, perhaps. Uncaring
Odysseus went his way to sleep securely
(no matter where--he'd been so long seafaring,
and when he was required they'd call him surely).
Odysseus heard the swans: it was alarming
the song they sang: their tones were deep and ringing,
but put them down at first as merely charming,
and some of it seemed nonsense they were singing.
Odysseus tried to close his busy mind,
not guessing they might sing for all mankind. (1)